I usually can’t stand the claim that people who take a political position I dislike are “un-American” or “hate America.” That’s almost always a demagogic smear. But it turns out the be precisely what the public school committe in San Francisco behind this initiative are. Read on:

Dozens of San Francisco schools could soon be renamed, according to a San Francisco Unified School District advisory committee.

The committee has been reviewing names for months, and they’ve identified 44 schools that meet re-naming criteria, based on “relevance and appropriateness.”

The standards shared by the advisory committee consider the following criteria:

• Anyone directly involved in the colonization of people
• Slave owners or participants in enslavement
• Perpetrators of genocide or slavery
• Those who exploit workers/people
• Those who directly oppressed or abused women, children, queer or transgender people
• Those connected to any human rights or environmental abuses
• Those who are known racists and/or white supremacists and/or espoused racist beliefs
• Many of the schools are named after historic figures, including George Washington and Dianne Feinstein.

The names of presidents and other political and historic figures could soon be purged from SFUSD schools. This includes George Washington, Diane Feinstein, even Abraham Lincoln.

This is crazy, of course, but par for the course with our Woke Totalitarian Left, which never met any inconvenient historical fact that it didn’t want to erase. These people really do hate America — the actually existing America, with all its faults and virtues. They want to erase it all.

In Live Not By Lies, I write about how totalitarian regimes always try to control a culture’s collective memory. They want to erase the past so that they can build something new on it, without resistance. Excerpt:

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people.

In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

If the schoolchildren of San Francisco are compelled to forget any figures from the past tainted by what this current generation of left-wing zealots believe to be sin so grave that their memory should be consigned to oblivion, the young will be conditioned to accept without protest the construct of ideological lies that the radicals wish to impose. This is the point!

When I was researching the book, a Budapest teacher named Tamás Sályi told me that in his youth, the Hungarian communist regime plied them constantly with propaganda denouncing everything in the pre-communist past as ugly, cruel, bigoted, and outmoded. All were taught to hate everything about the past — this, as part of justifying the new order. Sályi told me that ironically, free-market capitalism in Hungary has done a more effective job of erasing his nation’s cultural memory than even communism did. More from the book:

The idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty has been poison for Hungarians, he believes. About progressives today, Sályi says, “I think they really believe that if they erase all memory of the past, and turn everyone into newborn babies, then they can write whatever they want on that blank slate. If you think about it, it’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.”

Along these lines, this morning I was on Morning Joe to talk about Live Not By Lies. I got into it hot with Eddie Glaude, a Princeton professor who denied that there is any such thing as woke totalitarianism, and who said the only people who believe that are white supremacists like me who are angry that they can’t say whatever they like about people like him (Prof. Glaude is black). He was supremely unaware that he confirmed part of my thesis: that intolerant lefties like him demonize all critics as racist, or otherwise bigoted.

I’m going to post that segment with Prof. Glaude, me, and the other guests as soon as it’s available on YouTube, so you can judge for yourself. I don’t know if Prof. Glaude would support what this San Francisco school board committee is doing, but as a general matter, both he and his San Francisco woke comrades are united in their rigid ideological assault on classically liberal norms and American history.

UPDATE:

Clip hasn’t been posted to YouTube, but here’s a screengrab:

Oh, wokeness, is there anything you can’t do? News from our Ivy League betters, in this case, Cornell:

During the English department’s first faculty meeting of the fall semester, faculty members of color introduced a proposal — to change the department’s name.

The new proposed name — “the department of literatures in English” — would mark a distinct change in the department’s branding, helping to eliminate what Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Kate McCullough, English, said was the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”

Earlier this month, a significant majority of the department approved the change, and is now awaiting approval from college administration.

The decision to demand such a change was spurred by this summer’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s death, according to Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, English, one of the original proposal writers. As a result, the faculty felt a sense of obligation to react in their own department.

“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general — began to look at the institution to see how we can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again,” Boyce-Davies said.